Comment by _fat_santa
17 days ago
The biggest issue I see is Microsoft's entire mentality around AI adoption that focuses more on "getting the numbers up" then actually delivering a product people want to use.
Most of the announcements I hear about Copilot, it's always how they've integrated it into some other piece of software or cut a deal with yet another vendor to add it to that vendors product offering. On the surface there's nothing wrong with doing that but that just seems to be the ONLY thing Microsoft is focused on.
Worse yet, most of these integrations seem like a exercise in ticking boxes rather than actually thinking through how integrating Copilot into a product will actually improve user experience. A great example was someone mentioned that Copilot was now integrated into the terminal app but beyond an icon + a chat window, there is zero integration.
Overall, MS just reeks of an organization that is cares more about numbers on a dashboard and pretty reports than they are on what users are actually experiencing.
I expect this is the crux of the problem.
There aren't any "AI" products that have enough value.
Compare to their Office suite, which had 100 - 150 engineers working on it, every business paid big $$ for every employee using it, and once they shipped install media their ongoing costs were the employees. With a 1,000,000:1 ratio of users to developers and an operating expense (OpEx) of engineers/offices/management. That works as a business.
But with "AI", not only is it not a product in itself, it's a feature to a product, but it has OpEx and CapEx costs that dominate the balance sheet based on their public disclosures. Worse, as a feature, it demonstrably harms business with its hallucinations.
In a normal world, at this point companies would say, "hmm, well we thought it could be amazing but it just doesn't work as a product or a feature of a product because we can't sell it for enough money to both cover its operation, and its development, and the capital expenditures we need to make every time someone signs up. So a normal C staff would make some post about "too early" or whatever and shelve it. But we don't live in a normal world, so companies are literally burning the cash they need to survive the future in a vain hope that somehow, somewhere, a real product will emerge.
For most software products I use, if the company spent a year doing nothing but fixing P2 bugs and making small performance improvements, that would deliver far, FAR more value to me than spending a year hamfistedly cramming AI into every corner of the software. But fixing bugs doesn't 1. pad engineer's resumes with new technology, or 2. give company leadership exciting things to talk about to their golfing buddies. So we get AI cram instead.
I think it is more externally driven as well, a prisoners dilemma.
I don't want to keep crapping out questionable features but if competitors keep doing it the customer wants it -- even if infrastructure and bug fixes would actually make their life better.
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I strongly felt this way about most software I use before LLMs became a thing, and AI has ramped the problem up to 11. I wish our industry valued building useful and reliable tools half as much as chasing the latest fads and ticking boxes on a feature checklist.
This is exactly what I was thinking about my current place of employment. Wouldn't all of our time be spent better working on our main product than adding all these questionably useful AI add ons? We already have a couple AI addons we built over the years that aren't being used much.
To you – yes. But have you thought about the shareholders?
100% agree. Office and Windows were hugely successful because they did things that users (and corporations) wanted them to do. The functionality led to brand recognition and that led to increased sales. Now Microsoft is putting the horse before the cart and attempting to force brand recognition before the product has earned it. And that just leads to resentment.
They should make Copilot/AI features globally and granularly toggleable. Only refer to the chatbots as "Copilot," other use cases should be primarily identified on a user-facing basis by their functionality. Search Assistant. Sketching Aid. Writing Aid. If they're any good at what they do, people will gravitate to them without being coerced.
And as far as Copilot goes, if they are serious as me it as a product, there should be a concerted effort to leapfrog it to the top of the AI rankings. Every few weeks we're reading that Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT, or DeepSeek has broken some coding or problem-solving score. That drives interest. You almost never hear anything similar about Copilot. It comes off as a cut-rate store brand knockoff of ChatGPT at best. Pass.
>Now Microsoft is putting the horse before the cart and attempting to force brand recognition before the product has earned it. And that just leads to resentment.
I'm surprised that they haven't changed the boot screen to say "Windows 11: Copilot Edition".
I thought Copilot was just ChatGPT - isn't that the whole point of Microsoft's massive investment in OpenAI ?
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I think this is a really good take, and not one I’ve seen mentioned a lot. Pre-Internet (the world Microsoft was started for), the man expense for a software company was R&D. Once the code was written, it was all profit. You’d have some level of maintenance and new features, but really - the cost of sale was super low.
In the Internet age (the likes of Google and Netflix), it’s not much different, but now the cost of doing business is increased to include data centers, power, and bandwidth - we’re talking physical infrastructure. The cost of sale is now more expensive, but they can have significantly more users/customers.
For AI companies, these costs have only increased. Not only do they need the physical infrastructure, but that infrastructure is more expensive (RAM and GPUs) and power hungry. So it’s like the cost centers have gone up in expense by log-units. Yes, Anthropic and OpenAI can still access a huge potential customer base, but the cost of servicing each request is significantly more expensive. It’s hard to have a high profit margin when your costs are this high.
So what is a tech company founded in the 1970s to do? They were used to the profit margins from enterprise software licensing, and now they are trying to make a business case for answering AI requests as cheaply as possible. They are trying to move from low CapEx + low OpEx to and market that is high in both. I can’t see how they square this circle.
It’s probably time for Microsoft to acknowledge that they are a veteran company and stop trying to chase the market. It might be better to partner with a new AI company that is be better equipped to manage the risks than to try to force a solo AI product.
> cost of doing business is increased to include data centers, power, and bandwidth
Microsoft Azure was launched in 2010. They've been a "cloud" company for a while. AI just represents a sharp acceleration in that course. Unfortunately this means the software products have been rather neglected and subject to annoying product marketing whims.
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Yeah. Hyperscalers who are building compute capacities became asset heavy industries. Today's Google, MSFT, META are completely different than 10 years ago and market has not repriced that yet. These are no longer asset light businesses.
ITT: we assume that "computer rooms", mainframes, and other dev tools weren't a thing for software companies pre-cloud
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They bet the company on AI. If their AI push fails, everything else does not matter anymore. What you are seeing is desperation and Hail Marys.
My guess is every team's metric is probably reduced to tokens consumed through the products owned.
take it a step further: the global market is stagnant, and the big gains of the 90s-2010s are gone.
you either hail mary AI or you watch your margins dwindle; captialism does not allow for no-growth.
> But with "AI", not only is it not a product in itself, it's a feature to a product, but it has OpEx and CapEx costs that dominate the balance sheet based on their public disclosures. Worse, as a feature, it demonstrably harms business with its hallucinations.
I think it depends on how the feature is used? I see it as mostly as yet another user interface in most applications. Every couple of years I keep forgetting the syntax and formulas available in Excel. I can either search for answers or describe what i want and let the LLM edit the spread sheet for me and i just verify.
Also, as time passes the OpEx and CapEx are projected to reduce right? It maybe a good thing that companies are burning through their stockpiles of $$$ in trying to find out the applicability and limits of this new technology. Maybe something good will come out of it.
The thing about giving your application a button that costs you a cent or two every time a user clicks on it is, then your application has a button that costs you a cent or two every time a user clicks on it.
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To be fair. MS Office product defects should be regarded just as harmful as hallucinations. Try a lookup in excel on fields that might have text.
For coding,ai is amazing and getting better.
Spell checking is also good, grammar better then me lol
And pumping out fake news and propaganda, way worth it when you do it
Your premise that the leaders of every single one of the top 10 biggest and most profitable companies in human history are all preposterously wrong about a new technology in their existing industry is hard to believe.
AI is literally the fastest growing and most widely used/deployed technologies ever.
Yup, I've been here before. Back in 1995 we called it "The Internet." :-) Not to be snarky here, as we know the Internet has, in fact, revolutionized a lot of things and generated a lot of wealth. But in 1995, it was "a trillion dollar market" where none of the underlying infrastructure could really take advantage of it. AI is like that today, a pretty amazing technology that at some point will probably revolutionize a lot of things we do, but the hype level is as far over its utility as the Internet hype was in 1995. My advice to anyone going through this for the first time is to diversify now if you can. I didn't in 1995 and that did not work out well for me.
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> Your premise that the leaders of every single one of the top 10 biggest and most profitable companies in human history are all preposterously wrong about a new technology in their existing industry is hard to believe.
Their incentives are to juice their stock grants or other economic gains from pushing AI. If people aren't paying for it, it has limited value. In the case of Microsoft Copilot, only ~3% of the M365 user base is willing to pay for it. Whether enough value is derived for users to continue to pay for what they're paying for, and for enterprise valuation expectations to be met (which is mostly driven by exuberance at this point), remains to be seen.
Their goal is not to be right; their goal is to be wealthy. You do not need to be right to be wealthy, only well positioned and on time. Adam Neumann of WeWork is worth ~$2B following the same strategy, for example. Right place, right time, right exposure during that hype cycle.
Only 3.3% of Microsoft 365 users pay for Copilot - https://old.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1g78sgf/...
> In the late 90s and early 00s a business could get a lot of investors simply by being “on the internet” as a core business model.
> They weren’t actually good business that made money…..but they were using a new emergent technology
> Eventually it became apparent these business weren’t profitable or “good” and having a .com in your name or online store didn’t mean instant success. And the companies shut down and their stocks tanked
> Hype severely overtook reality; eventually hype died
("Show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome" -- Charlie Munger)
Your premise that the leaders of every single one of the top 10 biggest and most profitable companies in human history are all preposterously wrong about a new technology in their existing industry is hard to believe.
It's happened before.
Your premise that companies which become financially successful doing one thing are automatically excellent at doing something else is hard to believe.
Moreover, it demonstrates both an inability to dispassionately examine what is happening and a lack of awareness of history.
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I find it very easy to believe. The pressures that select for leadership in corporate America are wholly perpendicular to the skills and intelligence for identifying how to leverage novel and revolutionary technologies into useful products that people will pay for. I present as evidence the graveyard of companies and careers left behind by many of those leaders who failed to innovate despite, in retrospect, what seemed to be blindingly obvious product decisions to make.
The product is the stock price, not Office or Windows. From that perspective they are doing it right.
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> top 10 biggest and most profitable companies in human history are all preposterously wrong
There's another post on the front page about the 2008 financial crisis, which was almost exactly that. Investors are vulnerable to herd mentality. Especially as it's hard to be "right but early" and watch everyone else making money hand over fist while you stand back.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46889008
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every time these companies make a mistake and waste billions of dollars it is well-publicized. so there is plenty of data that they are frequently and preposterously wrong.
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Were you around in 2008?
This industry has seen several bubbles in its existence. Many previously top companies didn't even survive them.
The mistake is simple. It is like the difference between giving you many tools to use vs making you the tool.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRq_SAuQDec
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Doesn't matter what the leaders think if the users hate it and call it slop
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/microsoft-satya...
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MS actually changed their office.com landing page to a funnel that tricks you to into installing a copilot app. It used to be the dashboard for MS web apps. There are no links to the web apps, but they are all still there, you just have to know the subdomains. The app doesn’t have any of the functionality that page used to offer…
For years I've used this as a home page of sorts for Microsoft products. It's very annoying not to be able to use it now.
I haven't used office.com but it does seem to have links to the four main webapps (did there used to be more?). They're the second row of big boxes titled "Word with Copilot", etc. Admittedly with very confusing names.
I checked way back machine and they have been making large changes to that page every day for the last month. It used to be a lie that office 365 was rename to office 365 copilot, yet it is an app with only chat bot functionality. They advertise the copilot integration for the main office apps now, but those are not part of the copilot app they are trying to trick you into installing.
Well there is no "Office" anymore, the suite is named "Microsoft 365 Copilot".
There are no office tools. It’s just a chatbot app. The page says they combined word and excel and PowerPoint, but it still doesn’t do anything but chat. I asked it to create a word document and it offered me a download link to a word template…
I noticed this and I wad enraged but it. The URL to the old page is way less easy to remember and I had to add it to my bookmarks. I'm still peeved about it.
I just attended a training about AI Foundry today and they advertised thousands of integrations and support for like 50 different models. There is no way in hell all that stuff is tested and working properly. Microsoft seems to just be trying to throw as much chum as possible in the ocean and seeing what bites.
I see Microsoft throwing spaghetti at the wall just in time as “AI” functionality hits government and educational procurement procedures.
The copilot product is obviously borked, and is outshone by ‘free’ competitors (Gemini, ChatGPT). But since the attributes and uses are so fuzzy, they have a minimum viable product to abort meaningful talk about competition while securing big contracts from governments and delivering dog water.
My anecdotal observations of copilot are people using competing products soon after trialling. Reports say Anthropics solution is in widespread use at Microsoft… a bunch of devs on MacBooks and iPhones using Claude to build and sell … not what they themselves use (since they are smart and have taste?).
They boosted copilot numbers by renaming office to copilot. No I'm not joking.
Musk could learn from this to boost his FSD subscription numbers for his bonus payouts.
They did the same thing with Azure right? I remember articles about Microsoft stock that would mention that Azure subscription numbers included Office 365. But the thing is, their weird game of inflating numbers worked. There wasn’t really any negative consequence of doing that. So why wouldn’t they do it again? It’s yet another unfortunate example of dishonesty being rewarded these days.
> "The biggest issue I see is Microsoft's entire mentality around AI adoption that focuses more on "getting the numbers up" then actually delivering a product people want to use."
That succinctly describes 90% of the economy right now if you just change a word and remove a couple:
The biggest issue I see is the entire mentality that focuses more on "getting the numbers up" than actually delivering a product people want to use.
KPI infection. You see projects whose goal is, say "repos with A I code review turned on" vs "Code review suggestions that were accepted". And then if you do get adoption (like, say, a Claude Code trial), then VPs balk about price. If it's actually expensive now it's because they are actually using it all the time!
The same kind of logic that led companies to migrate from Slack to Teams. Metrics that don't actually look at actual, positive impact, as nobody picks a risky KPI, and will instead pick a useless one that can't miss.
My phone, laptop, TV, fridge, etc., all demonstrably worse than they were 5 years ago.
This is the bad side of things like OKRs. They push you away from user satisfaction since that harder to measure, coupled with go consequences for missing them. People just force adoption without taking the product signals that come from users rejecting your changes.
I have Copilot buttons sprinkled everywhere on my work computer, and every time I have tried to use them I get something saying "Oh, I can't do that". It's truly baffling.
Copilot button on my email inbox? I try "Find me emails about suchandsuch", and get the response "I don’t have direct access to your email account. If you’re using Outlook (desktop, web, or mobile), here are quick ways to find all emails related to...". Great, so it doesn't even know what program it's runnning in, let alone having any ability to do stuff in there! Sigh.
Using the paid M365 Copilot ($30/mo) Chat and Researcher agent, I recently discovered an interesting limit: Copilot is technically unable to retrieve more than 24 email messages. Ever.
We can't know if the answers I got from it are reliable but it seems like the Microsoft Graph API calls it makes and the tools Copilot has are missing the option to call the next page. So, a paginated response is missing all data beyond the first page.
I vibe coded this page as "documentation" since obviously no official MS docs exist for anything like this: https://vibes.jukkan.com/copilot-search-gotchas.html
I tried copilot agent once, and it just claimed that it accessed a website that should have been blocked by corporate firewalls and uploaded a bunch of proprietary data. Lots of very specific information about how it clicked on specific buttons of the website etc.
We raised a high priority ticket with MS and turns out that Copilot Agent lied about the entire thing because the website was blocked. It completely made it up.
The fact that we are supposed to use Copilot Agent for open-ended "research" is mind-boggling.
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I'm baffled by this as well, Microsoft seems to have lost the plot almost completely.
A whole new toolbar appeared in Outlook on my work computer with nothing but a single button to open a copilot chat window. I tried asking it a few simple questions and it completely failed at all of them. Copilot didn't even know if I was using the web or desktop version of the very app it was embedded in!
Wasting UI space for a useless tool it's just a waste of time, it actively makes it harder to get work done. But I guess the important thing is the number of times that AI button gets clicked is going up on some PMs telemetry dashboard.
Yeah did they test any of this? Did they run a pilot and ask 1000 users did you use it? Did you like it? Is it better with this than without it?
It's as though they think some "AI revolution" will come, and all they need to do is just make sure that by the time it does, they will have sprinkled enough AI pixie dust on their products and services. And then they added some KPI's in the organization and called it a day.
Most of all the whole strategy feels extremely faceless. Who is the visionary here? Where are the proud product launches and visionary blog posts about how all this happens?
The wild thing is, the business prop is so clear - an llm built into your corporate data, with the same security, guard rails, grc auditing stack that protects the rest of your data. Why integrate and exfiltrate to an outside company?
But copilot is fucking terrible. Sometimes I ask it powershell questions about microsoft products and it hallucinates answers. Get your shit together microsoft, why would I use this product for any reason if it doesnt work squarely inside your own stack
Last year we wanted IT to confirm that Copilot Agent hadn't exfiltrated data and we couldn't get logs for its website usage without raising a ticket to Microsoft. Maybe this changed, maybe our IT people are bad, but I for one wasn't impressed.
Or, scaling back trying to keep their datacenter bill manageable.
Used to be one could upload an unlimited number of files (20 at a time) and process them directly at the initial window --- now one has to get into "Pages Mode", and once there, there's a limit on the number of files which can be uploaded in a given 24-hour period.
Excel integration is amazing, saves me hours a week and helps me write complicated formulas in seconds.
That only good if you're doing measurably more with the time you save. I feel like I'm significantly faster in parts of my job using Copilot, but when I try to get data on what I'm doing now that I wasn't doing before I had it I don't come up with anything. I know I'm working faster, but the time seems to have just gone.
Working faster, but at what?
LLM workflow:
Describing to Claude that I need an edit made in the second paragraph of the third section feels easy, comfortable, and straightforward. I’m using my speech centers, speech to text, and then I wait for a generation during which I hit my phone or Reddit. Poof, the text flies out like magic, taking 20+ seconds, then I re-re-re-read it to make sure the edit was good and nothing was lost in that edit. Oops, the edit inverted the logic of the paragraph, lemme repeat the above… and again… time flies! 2 hours gone in a flash.
Old and boring workflow:
I gruellingly move my mouse to open a file, then take a coffee break. I come back and left-click into the sentence that sucks. I hit Reddit to deal with the anxiety… I think, boo, and then type out the edit I needed. It’s bad, I fix. Coffee break. Squiggly red line from a misspelling? I fix. I google and find a better turn of phrase, copy and paste it in manually with a little edit. Ugh. This sucks. I suck, work sucks. Time sucks. 35 entire minutes of my life has been wasted… time to get another coffee and check Reddit.
———
Working with an LLM is kinda like working under stage hypnosis. The moment to moment feelings are deceptive and we humans are unreliable recorders of time-usage. Particularly when engaged in unwanted effort.
Google has had all this tech for a minute. Their restrained application and lack of 10x-vibe-chad talk make me think their output measurements are aligned with my measurements.
1 rabbit hole hallucination wrong-turn can eat up a lot, lot, lot of magic one-shotting.
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They should be trying to convince people it is something they want rather than forcing it on people. Alas that would mean making a product people want and Im not sure they are there.
It feels like that's the entire MO of the Azure platform as well. Make a minimum viable product and then get adoption by selling at all costs, despite the products edges.
Didn't Nadella come from the Azure side? In that sense it'd make sense that what they were doing would spread to the rest of the company.
And Teams
The products they are delivering remain somewhat poorly promoted.
Designer is more than an LLM grafted to a text field. https://designer.microsoft.com/
If you go to microsoft.com, which link at the top would you click to get to Designer?
> Designer is more than an LLM grafted to a text field. https://designer.microsoft.com/
It's an AI image generator. There's thousands of tools that do this exact thing, and it seems their only "benefit" is infesting search engine image results with their horrible low-quality output.
...
On a related note, here's another great LLM feature Microsoft seemingly failed to promote: instead of returning bits of page content or the description meta tag, the Bing API now gives you utter slop[0] for website descriptions!
[0]: https://old.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/1pomrdg/aigener...
It's more than an image generator, and if you pop open the UX, it's somewhat thoughtfully laid out.
Image generator meets editor meets page design.
Sounds almost like every manager just covers their ass by formally doing what is expected core top-down idea is "AI is a future, thus make it everywhere".
Anyone who would try to say "let's not do AI" would be a white crow, will be eaten by other managers in reviews and discussions.
Bad leadership, bad management.
So it's FOMO, formalism and conformism.
I wonder if there is somebody here high up in the MSFT stack who understands the tech/code but also oversees more stuff to be able to opine.
I really don't know what it does other than respond to emails in Outlook.
It's good for creating meeting notes and action lists in Teams, but that's about it.
MS use of AI in apps really feels like their Google+ moment.
I found that the time I spent reviewing and fixing issues/errors/omissions in Copilot’s meeting notes was more than just cleaning up my own notes that I took and sending out.
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Copilot in Word and PowerPoint is complete slop. Claude Code is better with PPT.
even Gemini is better with powerpoint, and they are the nr 1 competitor
CEO has only delivered failure, and in trying to avoid that, they brought it